Diabetes mellitus is a serious illness characterized by a loss of the ability to regulate blood glucose levels. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that more than 180 million people worldwide have Diabetes. This number is likely to more than double by 2030. In 2005, an estimated 1.1 million people died from Diabetes; this estimate likely undercounts deaths caused by Diabetes, as Diabetes contributes to other diseases, such as heart disease and kidney disease, that may be listed as the cause of death. Almost 80% of Diabetes deaths occur in low and middle-income countries. See URL World-Wide-Web.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs312/en/index.html.
Diabetes Mellitus is subdivided into Type 1 Diabetes and Type 2 Diabetes. Type 1 Diabetes (insulin-dependent Diabetes or childhood-onset Diabetes) results from a lack of insulin production due to an autoimmune mediated destruction of the beta cells of the pancreas. Patients require daily administration of insulin for survival and are at risk for ketoacidosis. Patients with Type 1 Diabetes exhibit little or no insulin secretion as manifested by low or undetectable levels of insulin or plasma C-peptide (also known in the art as “soluble C-peptide”).
Type 2 Diabetes (non-insulin-dependent Diabetes or adult-onset Diabetes) results from insensitivity to insulin, and accounts for 90% of Diabetes worldwide. Gestational Diabetes is a loss of blood sugar control (hyperglycemia) that occurs during pregnancy. Type 2 Diabetes is characterized by disorders of insulin action and insulin secretion, either of which may be the predominant feature. Type 2 Diabetes patients are characterized with a relative, rather than absolute, insulin deficiency and are insulin resistant. At least initially, and often throughout their lifetime, these individuals do not need supplemental insulin treatment to survive. Type 2 Diabetes accounts for 90-95% of all cases of Diabetes and can go undiagnosed for many years because the hyperglycemia is often not severe enough to provoke noticeable symptoms of Diabetes or symptoms are simply not recognized. The majority of patients with Type 2 Diabetes are obese, and obesity itself may cause or aggravate insulin resistance. Many of those who are not obese by traditional weight criteria may have an increased percentage of body fat distributed predominantly in the abdominal region (visceral fat). Whereas patients with this form of Diabetes may have insulin levels that appear normal or elevated, the high blood glucose levels in these diabetic patients would be expected to result in even higher insulin values had their beta cell function been normal. Thus, insulin secretion is often defective and insufficient to compensate for the insulin resistance. On the other hand, some hyperglycemic individuals have essentially normal insulin action, but markedly impaired insulin secretion.
Pre-diabetics often have fasting glucose levels between normal and frank diabetic levels. Abnormal glucose tolerance, or “impaired glucose tolerance” can be an indication that an individual is on the path toward Diabetes; it requires the use of a 2-hour oral glucose tolerance test for its detection. However, it has been shown that impaired glucose tolerance is by itself entirely asymptomatic and unassociated with any functional disability. Indeed, insulin secretion is typically greater in response to a mixed meal than in response to a pure glucose load; as a result, most persons with impaired glucose tolerance are rarely, if ever, hyperglycemic in their daily lives, except when they undergo diagnostic glucose tolerance tests. Thus, the importance of impaired glucose tolerance resides exclusively in its ability to identify persons at increased risk of future disease (Stern et al, 2002)
Diabetes is generally diagnosed by determining blood glucose levels after fasting overnight (fasting plasma glucose level) or by determining blood glucose levels after fasting, followed by ingestion of glucose and a blood glucose measurement two hours after glucose administration (a glucose tolerance test). In studies conducted by Stern and colleagues (Stern et al., Diabetes Care 25:1851-1856, (2002)), the sensitivity and false-positive rates of impaired glucose tolerance as a predictor of future conversion to Type 2 Diabetes was 50.9% and 10.2%, respectively, representing an area under the Receiver-Operating Characteristic Curve of 77.5% (with a 95% confidence interval of 74.3-80.7%) and a P-value (calculated using Hosmer-Lemeshow goodness-of-fit) of 0.20. Because of the inconvenience associated with the two-hour glucose tolerance test, as well as the cost of the test, the test is seldom used in routine clinical practice. Moreover, patients whose Diabetes is diagnosed solely on the basis of an oral glucose tolerance test have a high rate of reversion to normal on follow-up and may in fact represent false-positive diagnoses (Burke et al., Diabetes Care 21:1266-1270 (1998)). Stern and others reported that such cases were almost 5 times more likely to revert to non-diabetic status after 7 to 8 years of follow-up compared with persons meeting conventional fasting or clinical diagnostic criteria.
Beyond glucose and HBA1c, several single time point biomarker measurements have been attempted for the use of risk assessment for future Diabetes. U.S. Patent Application No. 2003/0100486 proposes C-Reactive Protein (CRP) and Interleukin-6 (IL-6), both markers of systemic inflammation, used alone and as an adjunct to the measurement of HBA1c. However, for practical reasons relating to clinical performance, specifically poor specificity and high false positive rates, these tests have not been adopted.
Often a person with impaired glucose tolerance will be found to have at least one or more of the common arteriovascular disease risk factors (e.g., dyslipidemia and hypertension). This clustering has been termed “Syndrome X,” or “Metabolic Syndrome” by some researchers and can be indicative of a diabetic or pre-diabetic condition. Alone, each component of the cluster conveys increased arteriovascular and diabetic disease risk, but together as a combination they become much more significant. This means that the management of persons with hyperglycemia and other features of Metabolic Syndrome should focus not only on blood glucose control but also include strategies for reduction of other arteriovascular disease risk factors. Furthermore, such risk factors are non-specific for Diabetes or pre-Diabetes and are not in themselves a basis for a diagnosis of Diabetes, or of diabetic status.
Risk prediction for Diabetes, pre-Diabetes, or a pre-diabetic condition can also encompass multi-variate risk prediction algorithms and computed indices that assess and estimate a subject's absolute risk for developing Diabetes, pre-Diabetes, or a pre-diabetic condition with reference to a historical cohort. Risk assessment using such predictive mathematical algorithms and computed indices has increasingly been incorporated into guidelines for diagnostic testing and treatment, and encompass indices obtained from and validated with, inter alia, multi-stage, stratified samples from a representative population. A plurality of conventional Diabetes risk factors is incorporated into predictive models. A notable example of such algorithms include the Framingham study (Kannel, W. B. et al, (1976) Am. J. Cardiol. 38: 46-51) and modifications of the Framingham Study, such as the National Cholesterol Education Program Expert Panel on Detection, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Cholesterol in Adults (Adult Treatment Panel III).
Other Diabetes risk prediction algorithms include, without limitation, the San Antonio Heart Study (Stern, M. P. et al, (1984) Am. J. Epidemiol. 120: 834-851; Stern, M. P. et al, (1993) Diabetes 42: 706-714; Burke, J. P. et al, (1999) Arch. Intern. Med. 159: 1450-1456), Archimedes (Eddy, D. M. and Schlessinger, L. (2003) Diabetes Care 26(11): 3093-3101; Eddy, D. M. and Schlessinger, L. (2003) Diabetes Care 26(11): 3102-3110), the Finnish-based Diabetes Risk Score (Lindstrom, J. and Tuomilehto, J. (2003) Diabetes Care 26(3): 725-731), and the Ely Study (Griffin, S. J. et al, (2000) Diabetes Metab. Res. Rev. 16: 164-171), the contents of which are expressly incorporated herein by reference.
Despite the numerous studies and algorithms that have been used to assess the risk of Diabetes, pre-Diabetes, or a pre-diabetic condition, a need exists for accurate methods of assessing such risks or conditions. Furthermore, due to issues of practicality and the difficulty of the risk computations involved, there has been little adoption of such an approach by the primary care physician that is most likely to initially encounter the pre-diabetic or undiagnosed early diabetic. Clearly, there remains a need for more practical methods of assessing the risk of future Diabetes.
It is well documented that pre-Diabetes can be present for ten or more years before the detection of glycemic disorders like Diabetes. Treatment of pre-diabetics with drugs such as acarbose, metformin, troglitazone and rosiglitazone can postpone or prevent Diabetes; yet few pre-diabetics are treated. A major reason, as indicated above, is that no simple and unambiguous laboratory test exists to determine the actual risk of an individual to develop Diabetes. Furthermore, even in individuals known to be at risk of Diabetes, glycemic control remains the primary therapeutic monitoring endpoint, and is subject to the same limitations as its use in the prediction and diagnosis of frank Diabetes. Thus, there remains a need in the art for methods of identifying, diagnosing, and treatment of these individuals who are not yet diabetics, but who are at significant risk of developing Diabetes.
Accordingly, there remains a need for a relatively inexpensive and convenient method for screening persons at risk for developing Diabetes. Such a test could be used for screening a large population to identify persons at risk for Diabetes, or for testing a single person to determine that individual's risk of developing Diabetes.